The First Mormon Temple in Italy - in Rome (sort of)

The temple looks large and impressive in this view, but it's actually quite small. The
curved planes seen here may be a citation to Meier's Jubilee Church, below,
or to Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. 

Our search for contemporary churches led us a few months ago to the first Mormon temple in Italy – dedicated on March 10 this year. It’s the 162^nd Mormon temple in the world.

It was indeed a search to find the temple, which is as far out of the center of Rome as any church we’ve found.  Touted as a building whose sponsors “spared no expense,” the temple is, frankly, underwhelming.  Of course, it must compete not only with the spectacular Catholic churches of the Renaissance, such as St. Peter’s and San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (both cited as inspirations for the temple) to name just two, but also 21^st-century churches we admire that include Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church and Piero Sartogo’s Santo Volto.

Scale model of interior of temple

For those who think Meier’s Jubilee Church is way out of town, you need to go twice as far to get to the Mormon Temple. It’s practically on top of the GRA (Rome’s outer ‘ring road’) and seems to fit in with, perhaps even be diminished by, the large, undistinguished shopping mall and apartment buildings nearby.

Meier's Jubilee Church

Piero Sartogo's Santo Volto

We found the temple decidedly uninspiring. The Salt Lake City-based Mormon architect might have done better to collaborate with an Italian starchitect to end up with something that approaches the awe-producing design of Paolo Portoghesi’s Mosque, or Meier's and Sartogo’s churches.

Mosque

Admittedly, we did not go inside the temple because once it is dedicated, non-Mormons are not permitted inside. Mormons are allowed inside only for specific purposes, which do not include basic church services.  The inside – from the scale model we were shown by a young American proselytizer at the Visitor Center, looks more homey than church-y.  Church services are held in a chapel, which again is decidedly – and it appears purposefully – plain.  There’s none of what Alain de Botton cites as the religious architecture that makes one almost believe there is a God.

Chapel

Adam and Eve

The Visitor Center paintings include an Adam and Eve who look like Barbie and Ken, the Mormons’ patron saint, Moroni, who looks like Charlton Heston, and others who may be designed to make us feel that we, too, can be figures in a Passion Play. It also has a faux Italian farmhouse and faux farm landscape.  A villetta was torn down to make way for the temple complex – so perhaps this is an homage to that villetta.  Regardless, it’s kitchy at best.

Moroni

Faux villetta inside Visitor Center

The Mormons have only recently been added to the list of religions that have an elevated status in Italy, allowing them some tax and other benefits. They cite the 1929 Concordat between Mussolini’s Fascist government and the Roman Catholic Church for inspiration, and they ended up hiring a lobbyist to get what they wanted, beginning that particular quest in 2006. The history of discrimination against the Mormons is an interesting one to be sure. Pope Francis met the LDS (see PS below) President in March, a first-ever meeting of those figures.

Faux campagna romana inside faux villetta

We’d like to think we’re eclectic in our lay appreciation of religious architecture, but, frankly, we’d skip this complex in favor of almost any other one in Rome. In fact, what attracted Bill on our scooter ride home was his discovery of a brutalist water tank that is in one of the books in our library on 200 great Rome architectural works of the 20^th century.  At least he got something out of our trek.

Dianne

Bill's brutalist water tower

PS We read recently that the Mormons no longer want to use that name and ask that everyone use the Church of Latter-Day Saints, or LDS for short.  Because they used Mormon when building and consecrating this temple, we stuck with it for this post.

RST Top 40: # 17. Richard Meier's Suburban Jubilee Church

In these dog days of summer, we're taking the opportunity to re-post the following piece.  Originally posted in 2010, it is the most popular item we've ever published--some 15,000 page views. 


The Jubilee Church in suburban Rome is perhaps U.S. architect Richard Meier’s finest work. Not easy to get to using public transportation, but well worth the trek for those in Rome a second time, and therefore it hits our Top 40 list at #17. (See more on Meier in the links at the end of this post.)

Dives in Misericordia (“Rich in Mercy” – the church’s religious name, taken from Pope John Paul II’s second encyclical) is set in the Tor Tre Teste working class neighborhood of Rome, as that Pope wanted. And it is one of “50 churches for Rome” commissioned for the church’s Jubilee year (celebrating the 2,000th anniversary of Christ’s birth - jubilee years come every 50 years, but clearly 2,000 was a special one), although it was not completed until 2003. (See also Sartogo and Grenon's Santo Volto Church in Marconi.)

Meier’s church is in essence 3 enormous curved sail forms, a shape unusual for him. The sacred part of the church is marked by the wonderfully organic and curved spaces these sails produce, while in the administrative part Meier returns to more familiar rectangular shapes, that we see, for example, in his Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Modern materials are a hallmark of this church project, including a coated cement that is self-cleaning, which was a delight for the white-obsessed Meier. Meier won the competition for the church over 5 other internationally famous architects, including Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman and Santiago Calatrava. Meier’s church is a testament to the Vatican’s good judgment, we think. See the New York Times' review of the church's consecrration: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/30/arts/vatican-s-modernist-moment-church-designed-richard-meier-consecrated-rome.html

We’ve also put directions on getting to the church via public transport at the end of this post.

The Vatican and Meier have been criticized for placing this modernist monument in a working class neighborhood, and basically cramming it into a space enclosed on 3 sides by unattractive apartment buildings and shops. But clearly this is what the Pope had in mind – lifting the neighborhood. As Meier recently said in response to questions about controversy over his works in Rome, “in Italy… unlike in [the U.S.]…architecture and politics are so intertwined.”

We think a trip to the Tor Tre Teste neighborhood is enlightening in many ways. You’ll see how ordinary Romans live. You’ll see magnificent architecture soaring in the midst of the commonplace – what could be more representative of Rome? If you walk a few yards from the church, you’ll also be able to amble through a park with a preserved ancient aqueduct – again, very Roman.

Meier’s other building in Rome is the “museum” and display of the 9th century BC Ara Pacis, the Roman altar to peace (“pacis”) - in this case meaning Roman conquest. It was the subject of even more controversy when it opened in 2006 (and there's still controversy - see Bill's post on a tunnel to be built along the Tevere next to the Ara Pacis). The right-wing picketed (we were there to cross the lines); the new right-wing mayor Alemanno called for Meier’s building to be torn down (or moved to the suburbs). Like everything else in Rome, these nutsy ideas, while stoking the culture wars ($24 million! To an American! It’s just a white box! It’s for the elite!), are now little more than vapors in the air. We didn’t put the Ara Pacis on our RST Top 40 list because it belongs on the First Time list – it’s the 3rd most visited site in Rome.

Dianne
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(For more on Meier, see Bill's post on Rome's "Starchitects", Piazzo Augusto Imperatore, where the Ars Pacis is located - which comes in at No. 9 on RST's Top 40, and further afield the Rome/Michael Graves connection..  Generally for architectural comparisons of the highest order in Rome, see our recent post on MAXXI versus MACRO.)

Transportation:
Best option: get a friend to drive you;

second, take a taxi (but it will be very costly);

third - public transport as follows:
In back (on the South side; right as you're facing the terminal) of the main train station in Rome (Stazione Termini) is a commuter train line. You can take Bus 105 or 105L from the front of Termini to this place (3 stops) - or just ask and walk the several blocks back there. Then take the "train" labelled GARDINETT (for Gardinetti) 16 stops - the stop you want is "Tobagi"; the train runs every 5 minutes in normal hours. Walk about 50 yards to the bus stop "Tobagi" and catch Bus 556 (Gardenie) for 12 stops (to Tovaglieri/Ermoli); the 12 stops aren't that long, really just winding through the suburban high rises. The bus runs every 15 minutes. When you get off, you're 100 yards from the church and you should be able to see it or find it by asking for the church.

TO RETURN: Go back to where you got Bus 556 and take it again, going in the same direction you had been to arrive (Gardenie) - not back; take it 11 stops to Togliatti/Molfetta; go to the Tram stop Togliatti (this is a real tram) and take Tram 14 back to Termini.
Caveat: we have not taken public transportation; I'm relying on the City's transportation site for these directions. Don't ask me why the ways to/from are different. If you're a walker, you could walk to/from the Train or to/from the Tram and not have to go to and from different ways. Just a suggestion. Good luck on this!

21st Century Churches Continued - out in the far-flung suburbs of Rome

It's been awhile since RST wrote about 21st-century churches (our last post on this was last May), and we're sure our readers have noticed.  OK, so maybe you haven't, but we have.  So here we give you one of  two 21st-century churches, by the same architect, obviously a favorite of the Vatican, Roberto Panella.

The asymmetrical and dramatic interior of Santa Maria Stella dell'Evangellizazione.  Lots of white, stained glass,
windows, but also a wood ceiling - the church as Christ's ship?

Isolated by roads, and perched in a corner lot.

It wasn't easy to get to Santa Maria Stella dell'Evangellizazione (translated by Wiki Churches of Rome as Our Lady, Star of Evangelization ), because it is nestled, or crowded, into a small, oddly shaped space midst wide roads and soaring apartment building in the modern southwestern extension of EUR.  We scootered out here after seeing, yet again, because Bill really wanted to, the not very interesting church (say I) that dominates EUR's skyline.

The neighborhood - the view from the church.

How the church fits on the lot.

Again, it's one of the "50 for Rome" churches, and was completed in 2006 to serve the burgeoning suburban population.  One source says it replaced "a totally inadequate hut."  The church's Web site (which has nothing on the architecture nor any pictures of the church!) states the parish was founded in 1989, when there already were thousands of people living in the area, inadequately served by a
church.  Today there are, says the parish, between 15,000 and 18,000 inhabitants in the parish.  Keeping a parish priest has been no mean feat, according to the parish Web site.

Moving from sociology to architecture, the church is noted for its asymmetrical shape, and overwhelming use of white - no doubt the influence of Richard Meier's magnificent and iconic Jubilee Church in another far-flung Rome suburb (Tor Tre Teste).  In fact, architect Panella, it's said, likened the roof to a billowing sail.  Sails also feature in Meier's 2003 (a couple years late for the Jubilee) church.

Interesting use of grass - yes, it's real.

There is no information on the decorations of the church, which also are notable, including the use of stained glass, openings created for light - one in the shape of a cross.  And, there is a fair amount of real grass and plants used in the various church adornments, such as the baptismal.















We also note the addition of a neon star (Santa Maria Stella, obviously) that likely was not in the architect's plans.

More photos below.  Dianne

Baptismal

The confessionals are old-fashioned.

The campanile looks as if rising from EUR-like
fascist columns

More of a sense of modernism in some views.

Room for a soccer field.

From the church front to the high rises.

Interesting Stations of the Cross; no information on the
artist.

21st Century Churches Continued: Inviting or Not?

In January we began a series on Rome's contemporary churches, noting that much of contemporary Rome architecture is found in its churches, and most of those in the ex-urban areas. These churches tell us about the state of modern architecture and in many cases provide some social history. We continue our series with the remarkable church of San Franceso di Sales in the Rome suburb of Alessandrino (named for the aqueduct that still runs through the area).

Side view of the distinctive copper roof

One of us likes it better than the other, but there's no doubt this church, consecrated in 2005, is distinctive.  Its dramatic front, squared off repeatedly, then capped with a hood-like point, is designed to represent an inviting portal.  Whether it's inviting or not, we leave to you.

Speaking of inviting, our first trek (and it was a trek) out to this church resulted in the gates being shut on us.  You can see the large grey metal gates that are open in the top photo above.  But we arrived at noon, and the gates quickly closed.  Despite our pleas: no exceptions.

So, being RST, we retired to the bar across the road, where one has a front and center view of that dramatic portal.  And we had the chance to talk to the locals about their impressions of the church.  They seem to like it, but feel a bit disappointed that it wasn't by a famous architect and had few visitors such as us, in contrast to a Richard Meier tourist attraction, his gorgeous Jubilee Church less than a mile away in the area of Tor Tre Teste (you can do both in the same trip; see transportation suggestions at the end of this post).

As with several of the other "50 churches for Rome 2000" we have seen, this one too has an open plan, with little to separate the side chapels and other traditional church elements.  It also uses plenty of white travertine and paint, though it's not blindingly white like Meier's.

Besides the dramatic portal, the distinctive feature of this church is its copper roof, perhaps echoing Renzo di Piano's metal covered auditoriums at Parco della Musica.  Or, perhaps the shape of the roof inside and out and the interior wood suggest a ship--even Noah's ark--a frequent metaphor for the Church and one used by Richard Meier in his Jubilee Church.

View towards the back of the church

Blue-tinted windows and arching roof of laminated wood bring
streams of light into the church

The inside of the church is also distinctive, with an octagonal shape, a wood-beamed roof, and 100 or so blue-tinted windows that produce a bounty of streams of light.

Modern, white interior fixtures; no indication
of an artist separate from the architects

The fixtures are all highly modern, in white travertine as well.

Stations of the Cross are outside

Walkway for the Stations of the Cross

The church is unusual in having the Stations of the Cross outside, along the side and behind the church.

The architects are Lucrezio Carbonaro, Paulo Dattero and Alfredo Re of Studio Dattero and Re.  We could find no other buildings of theirs cited anywhere.

The parish was founded in 1961.  One can imagine the suburban area just beginning to sprout up then. But the parish, and its priest, struggled for more than 40 years to construct a church here, encountering many hurdles.  As we noted above, it wasn't until 2005 that the church was consecrated. Apparently the church hierarchy took pity on the priest and included the new church in its 2000 plan even though, as the hierarchy said, the church did not meet the economic considerations to be one of the "50 churches for Rome 2000"--maybe because it's so close to the Jubilee Church. The priest died days before the church dedicated to San Francesco di Sales was consecrated, knowing it had been built.

Parishioners generally seem pleased with their modern church

Unlike some of the 21st century churches, this one seems to have
had few "homey" touches added

Below are more photos of the church, and some of its surroundings.

 If you want to see it, remember it is closed from noon to 4:30 p.m., and likely after 6 p.m.  Address:  viale Alessandrino, no. 585.  It's between via Prenestina and via Casilina, inside the GRA.  If you can handle some walking, you can take the #14 tram from Stazione Termini to its end, on viale Palmiro Togliatti, and walk a half mile or less to the church.  Then, less than 1 mile away from the church is Meier's Jubilee Church, and you can walk back to the #14 tram line.  You can also be dropped on viale P. Togliatti 2 short blocks from San Francesco di Sales by taking the Red Metro line (Anagnina direction) to the Cinecitta' stop and taking a # 451 bus (every 7 minutes during normal hours, on the southwest corner of via Tuscolona and viale Palmiro Togliatti; bus is labeled "Ponte Mammolo") from there 10 stops; apparently the same route doesn't work well going the other way.  The bus service (ATAC) recommends you take the #14 to get back to the centro. (For all bus directions, we recommend the www.atac.roma.it Web site.)

Look for more modern church posts in the future!

Dianne

Sunday mass; the ubiquitous white, perhaps Roman, columns

The church's suburban neighborhood seen from the church's high ground




Confessional

Detail on bell tower

Baptismal

Woman begging outside church was the recipient of alms
from the local parishioners, who seemed to know her well

Campanile 

Rome's Modern Churches Are Worth the Trek - starting with San Pio da Pietralcino in Malafede



Some of most spectacular architecture in Rome is found in its churches, and that includes 21^st century architecture.  The Rome Diocese has commissioned dozens of new churches, most in lower- and middle-class neighborhoods on the periphery, to serve the spreading population and to deal with the departure of these classes from the historic center.

one block away

We began our exploration of these modern churches with the most famous one, Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church in the suburban neighborhood of Tor Tre Teste, which came in at #17 on RST's Top 40.  That was almost 4 years ago. RST's post on Meier’s church is still the most popular on the blog. We have visited many other churches since then, and made a push this past year to see 6 more.  Some are by famous architects, with Meier at the top of the list, and others by relative unknowns.  They are all fascinating, for their architecture as well as for the social insights they provide.

detail from San Pio statue
in the church

With this post, RST begins a series on these 21^st- century landmarks.  We start with a church in a middle-class suburb of no architectural distinction; a church plunked down in the middle of large apartment blocks; a church dedicated to the controversial saint, Padre Pio, whom some consider a charlatan.  

One of the newest of the dozens of new churches, the Church of San Pio da Pietralcina, in Malafede, south of Rome on the way to Fiumicino airport, has a striking set of flowing, uneven arches that define it. Our friend and art history professor Shara Wasserman (see her Contemporary Rome Web site) describes it as like the Shroud of Turin, flowing out.  Hmm, we’re not so sure, but it’s certainly distinctive.

What the roofline does inside may be even more impressive.  The siting of the choir against the back of the main arch, is lovely, even if it is furnished so far only with plastic chairs.

One of the more daring aspects of this church is the use of only nominal separation between the main body of the church and the side chapels.  Additional rchitectural details, such as the size of the arch and windows and the lattice work forming a type of separate ceiling, separate the side chapel from the main body of the church.

Only the railing  and a vestigial ceiling separate the side chapel from a walkway,
on one side, and the main worship space, on the other

The liturgical furnishings in the interior – such as the tabernacle holding the Eucharist, the baptismal receptacle, the priest’s chair, the altar, the Stations of the Cross – are designed in roughly hewn travertine, quarried locally (near Guidonia), a modern aesthetic. We noticed the few potted plants that have been placed next to some of these modernist pieces, relieving their starkness, probably to the dismay of the artist, Italian Giovanna De Sanctis Ricciardone (http://www.giovannadesanctis.com/cv.html). This decorating of stark modern pieces with more homey touches is something we see in most of the 21^s- century churches.

altar chair

lectern

Stations of the Cross

baptismal station

looking out from the church to the neighborhood;
 note the protective fencing

  The construction of this church in a new neighborhood, with a newly created parish, is consistent with the Rome Diocese’s efforts to spread its message.  The neighborhood sprang up around 2000, and the church was consecrated in late 2010, after 3 years of construction.  On the church Web site (link below), a writer notes that the area could have been considered a desert when families bought apartments here in 2000.  Malafede (meaning “bad faith”) was basically a neglected area, known in the past for pirates and malaria.  Again, the placement of this church follows the population and also is an acknowledgement by the Church that parishioners are moving away from the city into these somewhat wasteland-like suburbs.

A heavy gate guards the church grounds, as is the case in most of the 21^st-century churches.  The gates may be closed not only at night, but during that part of the day when the priest is not in the church; this is an unfriendly aspect of modern church management, though perhaps necessary to protect church property with dwindling religious personnel.

The church's namesake, Padre Pio, or Saint Pius, as he now is known, is extremely popular worldwide, and the parishioners here seem to like having a church in Rome dedicated to him.  We note the use of Pio and the church's distinctive roof design on church posters. 

This view from in back of the church also shows the parish buildings, 
again of modern and interesting design. 
 The gardeners found a good place to store their supplies.

The back of the church is as intriguing as the front.  Here one can see some of the features of the construction – the beams that hold that roof in place, as well as the gardeners trying to beat back the weeds and using space in the beams to store their equipment.

A view of the gardeners - unsuccessful in getting
 that mower running (and one wonders how it
would handle those weeds) - also shows how tightly
 the church is placed next to the apartment buildings. 

  

The architects for this unusual church structure were Anselmo e Associati.  We could find nothing about them, even though they have a Facebook page, except they are a northern firm, in the province of Lombardy, north of Milan.

We've included below some other photos, showing the requisite bell tower and some other views of the church, as well as some relevant links.

How to get there?  That’s an issue.  We went by scooter.  The church, at via Paolo Stoppa, 12, is half-way between via Cristoforo Colombo and via Ostiense/via del Mare, past the GRA, midway between the towns of Vitinia and Acilia.  One public transportation option is to take the Roma-Lido train from the station in Ostiense (the station is next to the Metro Piramide stop) past EUR to Vitinia and walk about 1.5 miles.  Some of that walk is along via del Mare; so hopefully there’s some kind of pedestrian space. This is one of those times (and we will say that for most of these churches) when a taxi may be in order.

Dianne

Some links:

The church’s Web site: http://www.spdp.it  It has flags for various languages, but they don’t seem to work.  Use a Google or other Web translator.

And there is a brief post on wikia: http://romanchurches.wikia.com/wiki/San_Pio_da_Pietrelcina